Bill proposed to block public access to publicly funded research

THROUGH the National Institutes of Health, American taxpayers have long supported research directed at understanding and treating human disease. Since 2009, the results of that research have been available free of charge on the National Library of Medicine’s Web site, allowing the public (patients and physicians, students and teachers) to read about the discoveries their tax dollars paid for.

But a bill introduced in the House of Representatives last month threatens to cripple this site. The Research Works Act would forbid the N.I.H. to require, as it now does, that its grantees provide copies of the papers they publish in peer-reviewed journals to the library. If the bill passes, to read the results of federally funded research, most Americans would have to buy access to individual articles at a cost of $15 or $30 apiece. In other words, taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.

“Essentially, the bill seeks to prohibit federal agencies from conditioning their grants to require that articles reporting on publicly funded research be made accessible to the public online.”

What possible purpose does this bill have, other than to be a handout to a few journals?

Out of the blue two clueless politicians come up with this? Anyone think something is rotten in Denmark? Come on. I doubt either of them even knew any of those journals existed before they were "approached". And what's their reasoning to support this?

I'm no conspiracy theorist, but it sounds like they're being paid off one way or another.

Sounds like they're just returning to the old way. When NIH first started requiring free access, there was a lot of pushback from publishers. It's hard to cover costs if you're giving away your product free. All it ended up doing was raising publication costs since journals had to start charging enormous page fees to publish in order to offset free distribution.

... It's obvious lobbyists got to them. ...

That seems like the most reasonable guess ... until more is learned about this. This has nothing to do with any sort of conspiracy, imo. It's just business as usual ... imho. And it's one of the things that might be improved upon wrt American politics ... again, just imho.

But they charge huge subscription fees, do you really think they are hurting? Considering the costs that book publishers have with no guaranteed sales or subsciptions, I can't see how these journals aren't making a killing.

That's a poor comparison. The number of people who buy books/magazine subscriptions vs. peer-review journals is many orders of magnitude apart. In fact, for example, I can probably count the number of subscriptions to the American Journal of Physics in my city of half a million on my hand. There is certainly good reason to suspect there is something going on but just saying that what they sell is expensive is hardly an argument.

No matter what medium is used all journals will have expenses. As was said, it's hard to sell something if its being offered for free. That said, I do see an issue with not being able to see the results of something that our tax dollars paid for without having to pay for it again. But I'm sure the details are much different than what I imagine.

But it's not free.

They will still continue to get all of this without the bill. They are not at risk of losing anything that they already have, that's the point, they want not only keep what they have, they want to take everything away from the public. What's wrong here?

What's not free? The work published on the NLMW's website is offered free of charge according to what was posted.

You're telling a business not to after possible profit? Good luck with that. Businesses don't survive by not going after possible profit.

But book publishers have to pay authors up front before anything is published. It's a gamble that doesn't pay off many times. They have to pay for book tours and all of the associated expenses, advertising, forwarding books to bookstores never knowing if anything will sell. Journals have none of these expenses, it's pure guaranteed profit. What expenses do journals have? And they have exclusive rights for the first year! After a year, it's a bit old, eh? Plus they've already raked in the subscription money. There is no need for this bill.